Trump's latest tweets pile more fuel on a political firestorm ignited by the president's attempts to shift blame for deadly violence at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia to anti-racism counter-protesters.

File image of Donald Trump. AP

The "Unite the Right" rally, which drew hundreds of neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan members and white supremacists marching to anti-Semitic chants, was nominally prompted by plans to remove a statue of Confederate general Robert E Lee from a Charlottesville park.

Lee and Jackson, another Confederate commander during the 1861-1865 Civil War, have long been celebrated by many white southerners as icons of a lost cause, and reviled by other Americans as traitorous defenders of a slave-holding south.

"The beauty that is being taken out of our cities, towns and parks will be greatly missed and never able to be comparably replaced!" Trump said in a third tweet.